You'll gather loads of crafting materials just by playing The
Secret World. While the game teaches you how to assemble new items, the
secret is knowing what to craft, what to save, what to sell, what makes
what, and what crafting possibilities are available to you. Our latest
The Secret World guide addresses questions regarding the system known
as transcribing, assembly, or simply just plain crafting.

The Least You Need to Know...

Time is short; you've got hoardes of zombies, insurgents, and
vampires to slay. If you just want a list of do's and don'ts should you
decide you might want to give crafting (or "transcribing") a shot
someday, we've got you covered:

1. Press "Y" to bring up the crafting window. Pick up
your stack of materials with a left mouse click. Drag the stack over to
the assembly window, but do
not release the stack. While continuing to hold
down the left mouse button, right click once on each tile
where you want a material deposited. [Thanks to a community member for
sharing this handy tip for distributing materials. - Ed.]

2. Avoid selling weapons, talismans, and runes to a vendor.
Yes, you could use the pax. Yes, your inventory will get sloppy. But
with a downtiered refinement system that TSW uses, you'll need to
disassemble 5 weapons to assemble one weapon of your choice of
the same tier as the ones you disassembled. Since green
drops don't exactly grow on trees.

3. Disassemble potions and animas for easy runes. Don't get me
wrong: non-healers should always have an instant heal or heal-over-time
handy, since these are decidedly cheaper than repairs. But when you're
not running dungeons or content that's technically too difficult for
you, odds are you'll have some potions and anima to turn into easy
runes. Runes are the toughest material to refine, not because they're
particularly valuable, but because there's so many of them that it's
hard to build up enough to refine.

4. Gadgets work much like potions, but aren't consumed, making
them (in a word) awesome, and one of the primary early benefits of
crafting in The Secret World.

5. The game lets you preview the outcome of your assembly
before you commit, so always, always double check the result before you
click assemble.

5. To get a good grounding in TSW crafting, be sure to do
the...

Crafting Missions

Two Kingsmouth missions will serve as an orientation to
crafting in The Secret World: 'Zen and the Art of Weapon Maintenance'
found just outside of the Sheriff's station introduces you to weapon
crafting, while Sonya in the Raven's Nook will teach you about glyphs
through the mission titled 'The Occultist's Cookbook'. The missions
walk you through the steps below, are easy to do, and offer you fast
experience besides, so they're very much worth doing.

Crafting Basics and Diagrams

The Secret World uses a Minecraft-style crafting system that
requires you to arrange materials in certain shapes to create different
items. These shapes are somewhat intuitive, and you'll likely memorize
the ones needed for your class, but for your reference here are most of
the diagrams needed for crafting in The Secret World.

Weapon
Assembly Diagrams (each requires 7 metal)

Assault Rifle

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Dual Pistols

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Shotgun

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Fist Weapons

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Blade

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Hammer

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Elemental Focus

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Chaos Focus

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Blood Magic

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Talisman
Assembly Diagrams (requires fire, dust, or water)

Head (12 needed)

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Finger (8 needed)

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Neck (10 needed)

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Wrist (8 needed)

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Occult (8)

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Waist (10)

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Luck (8)

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Potions
and Glyphs (requires runes)

Potions

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Glyphs

X

X

X

X

Some Disassembly Required - Gathering and Crafting

But how do you get these materials? Unlike in other MMORPGs,
you won't harvest raw crafting components piecemeal (that is, apart
from weapon toolkits). Instead, you'll have to disassemble weapons,
glyphs, talismans, potions and items to get the materials you need to
transcribe new materials.

It's important to remember two things about disassembly: 1)
you lose any glyphs built into the weapon or talisman when you
disassemble, and 2) that weapons will always disassemble into materials
one tier lower than the tier needed to craft that exact item.

To illustrate this process, let's walk through a common
example. Most new players find themselves desperately in need of a
secondary weapon of decent quality (meaning Quality Level 2 or 3). If
you're not lucky enough to get one as a drop, you'll build up a
collection of weapons you can't or don't want to use. These weapons
disassemble into base metal, but the QL 2 toolkit requires imperfect
metal. In fact, base materials must always be refined into imperfect
materials to create useful items and glyphs.

To disassemble a weapon, drop it into the disassemble slot in
the crafting window (remember: hit Y to bring up the crafting window).
To refine base metal into imperfect metal, simply drop the entire stack
of base metal into the large window and click "Assemble" - each click
will refine 5 base metal into 1 imperfect metal. Keep clicking until
you have less than 5 base metal remaining, then click the small button
to the right of Assemble to return everything to your inventory.

Here's how materials refine into tiers of greater quality.
Remember, you'll need 5 of the lower tier to make 1 material of the
next higher tier.

Once you have 7 imperfect metal, you'll need a Weapon Toolkit.
These are an uncommon (green) drop in story areas and from vendors or
occasionally a rare (blue) drop in dungeons. Green toolkits produce
green weapons, blue toolkits produce blue weapons, and purple weapons
only exist as dungeon drops.

To create the weapon, arrange the metal in one of the weapon
shapes above, plop the toolkit into its slot, click assemble, and
you'll have your first weapon upgrade. The entire process looks
something like this:

Of course, not all items disassemble into metal. Talismans
disassemble into elements, and glyphs (as well as animas and potions)
disassemble into runes.

Metal - Used for weapons

Fire - Used for + attack
rating talismans

Dust - Used for + healing
rating talismans

Water -Used for + protection
rating talismans

Offensive Runes (filled in) -
Weapon Glyphs (prefixes & suffixes)

Defensive Runes (empty) -
Talisman Glyphs (prefixes & suffixes)

Glyphs

Glyphs fit into empty slots on some uncommon and higher
weapons and talismans and add stats and a special "prefix" to an item,
i.e. "Brutal Hammer".

Creating a glyph requires a special Glyph toolkit. To use this
toolkit, you must have an appropriate number of runes of the correct
tier (imperfect, normal, etc.). You cannot mix offensive
and defensive runes, but you can have two each of two
different runes. Alternatively, you may have four of the same rune.

Glyphs shouldn't be confused with Signets, which may only be
obtained as drops. In other words, the Signet itself cannot be crafted,
but must be fitted to a special slot on QL 10 items using a Signet
toolkit. Signets add a "suffix" to the item, i.e. "Brutal Hammer of the
Mists" as well as some stats specifically tailored to a deck or
advanced build.

For example, four wheel runes would give you a massive boost
to hit rating (as per the listing below).

Whichever type of rune you decide to craft, be sure to use the
correct configuration:

Glyph with four of same rune

X

X

X

X

Glyph with two different runes

X

X

Y

Y

Here's
a list of rune effects. For a complete list of recipes are prefixes,
feel free to check out
href="http://crygaia.com/raithwoods-crafting-guide-release-version/#eleven"
target="_blank">Raithwood's excellent aassembly guide.

Offensive Runes:

Denkyem - Critical Power Rating

Lu - Critical Rating

Trinity - Penetration Rating

Wheel - Hit Rating

Defensive Runes:

Earth - Block Rating

Koru - Physical Protection Rating

Pentagram - Magical Protection Rating

Yggdrasil - Evade Rating

Wedjat - Defense Rating

Gadgets & Consumables

Consumables (potions) and gadgets are crafted using roughly
the same recipes and materials, but gadgets are unique in two ways. As
mentioned before, they're essentially slightly underpowered, long
cooldown (~2 minutes for instant abilities) consumables that aren't
consumed when used. Also, they can be crafted with either runes or
elements (i.e. fire, dust, water) using the following configurations:

Gadget toolkits are a very rare drop, so be sure to use them
or sell lower tier ones that you don't want to use at a premium.
[Alternatively, the Council of Venice vendor at the Savage Coast
trading post sells uncommon (green) toolkits of all sorts, so be sure
to check there.]

Have a suggestion to improve this guide? Spot a mistake?
href="mailto:[email protected]" target="_blank">Send
it to us and we'll update the guide for everyone's benefit.

To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our
The Secret World
Game Page.

About The Author

Jeff's interest in online games stretches back to organizing neighborhood Unreal tournaments as a teenager, but when a college roommate introduced him to EverQuest, an interest became an obsession. Jeff joined the Ten Ton Hammer team in 2004 covering EverQuest II, and he's had his hands on just about every PC online and multiplayer game since.